Dear Reader,
I enjoy having lunch out — from trying newly opened cafés to indulging in the occasional Michelin-starred meal.
Which sounds simple enough.
Until you attempt to decide where to go.
Michelin has opinions. Gault & Millau has opinions. Google has opinions. TripAdvisor has opinions. Condé Nast Traveler has opinions. Your French friends have opinions. The woman behind you in line at the boulangerie most definitely has opinions.
And they're all eager to share them.
Which leaves me with 99 Michelin one-starred restaurants in Paris and way too many opinions on where to have lunch on Thursday.
So I decided to stop looking for one answer and instead figure out how the various answers fit together.
OBJECTIIVE RATINGS
Michelin: The OG
The Michelin Guide has been at this since 1900, when the tire company — yes, the tire company — started handing out little red books to encourage people to drive more; somewhere along the line they began encouraging drives to restaurants, perhaps to wear out the tires so readers would buy new ones from Michelin. Excellent strategy. But the restaurant reviews took off and nowadays one of those three Michelin stars is coveted by most every serious chef. To their credit Michelin cares about the food and that’s it; not the décor, nor the servers (not even when the waiter spilled curry sauce on a diner's daughter's fancy new sandals years ago and said daughter did not cry; their star survived, her sandals did not). Not even the price of any given meal is given weight in their reviews. Michelin inspectors never accept a ‘free experience’.
Gault & Millau: The Young(er) Cousin from France
Less famous outside France but fiercely respected within it, Gault & Millau was founded in the early 1970s by two food journalists — Henri Gault and Christian Millau — who created a scoring system running from 1 to 20 (although they mercifully don’t publish any restaurants with less than 10 points). The ladder between 10 and 20 points is segmented into toques — their answer to Michelin's stars — named for the traditional chef's hat and spread across five levels rather than three.
Their founding manifest focused on nouveau French cooking, rather than traditional, in the form of their ten commandments for restaurants, which ranged from the sensible (thou shalt not overcook) to the philosophical (thou shalt be inventive) to the frankly baffling:
Thou shalt avoid pickles, cured game meats, fermented foods, etc.
Pickles. They hated pickles? Was traditional French cuisine flush with pickle acoutrements? No olive branch extended to the pickle board.
Where Michelin asks is the food exceptional, Gault & Millau asks is the cooking interesting (sans pickles). The answers are often the same. Sometimes they're not. Which is more helpful?
To figure this out I looked at reviews by regular diners.
CROWDSOURCED REVIEWS
Both Google and TripAdvisor will happily encourage you to make a restaurant reservation and then guilt you into leaving a review afterward. That's where the similarities end.
Google reviews require actual effort — the kind of effort most people only bother with when they're either obsessed with the restaurant or absolutely hated it. Bottom line: Google reflects passion.
TripAdvisor
TripAdvisor, on the other hand, relies on its enthusiastic member community to share their experiences – good, bad or indifferent. TripAdvisor's ranking algorithm weighs the quality, quantity, and recency of member reviews to stack against every other restaurant in the city. In Paris, a restaurant sitting at #43 (out of 20,000+) is saying something. Conclusion: TripAdvisor rewards consistency.
So we have two prestige rating systems — Michelin and Gault & Millau — and two crowd-sourced ones with broad appeal — Google and TripAdvisor. Which raises the obvious question: is there a way to process all the information coming in from such varied sources and make sense of it all?
Meet the Dispatch Decoder.
DISPATCH DECODER v1.0
The Dispatch Decoder is an interactive tool that cross-references five data points, including: 1. Michelin star rating, 2. Gault & Millau toques and rating, 3. Google rating and review count, 4. TripAdvisor rating, review count and city ranking, and 5. the entry price for a prix fixe lunch — so you can determine which lunch spot is best for you.
At some restaurants, lunch costs just 38% of what dinner does. At others, it's the same price. Sure, the less expensive lunch menus may feature fewer courses, but the cooking should be every bit as exceptional. Trying these restaurants can make one feel like a total insider – and they’re probably not on any tourist bloggers’ radar.
To explore the 99 one-star restaurants on the Paris list, start by sorting on lunch price. Then layer in your ratings preferences. Then filter by arrondissement if you have a favorite neighborhood. What comes out the other side isn't a list someone else made for you — it's yours.
Go ahead – try it. We'll wait…
Final Notes
This is v1.0 — one-star Michelin restaurants in Paris, all 99 of them. Next up: the Bib Gourmand list — Michelin's best-kept secret for serious food at seriously approachable prices. And then we have ideas about which cities deserve their own Dispatch Decoder next (looking at you London and NYC). If you have thoughts — restaurants we should add, criteria we're missing, cities you'd find useful — the comments are open. Consider yourself a co-conspirator.